Exclusive Interview with NuCypher’s CTO, Michael Egorov

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CTO of one of the presenting companies, NuCypher. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with NuCypher’s promo codeNuCypher20LD17.

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Egorov: Before starting NuCypher, I worked on infrastructure tools at LinkedIn, where we faced some of the thorniest scaling challenges in the world. But my background is as a scientist and physicist, where I worked in an area closely related to quantum computing and cryptography. I was a bronze medalist in the 2003 International Physics Olympiad and graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Egorov: Proxy re-encryption is an evolution in PKI that provides an elegant solution for multi-party sharing of data. While PKI is great for two-party communication, it doesn’t scale well. In contrast, PRE allows you to transform data encrypted under one set of keys into being encrypted under a second, different set of keys, without any intermediate decryption step or expensive network traffic.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Egorov: Our application of PRE to Kafka is particularly interesting. NuCypher enables granular, end-to-end encryption of message streams. This allows customers to scale up their Kafka infrastructure without increasing their attack surface, with the added benefit of making Kafka PCI-compliant.